Introduction: Interrogating the Postnation in African Literary Writing: Localities and Globalities

In his introduction to The Granta Book of the African Short Story, Helon Habila puts forward the claim that the new generation of African writers might best be described as “post-nationalist,” suggesting that contemporary writers—often referred to as the “third generation” of African writing—might have “the best potential to liberate [themselves] from the often predictable, almost obligatory obsession of the African writer with the nation and with national politics, an obsession that at times has been beneficial to African writing, but more often has been restrictive and confining to the African writer’s ambition” (viii). Invoking Machera’s provocative claim that “if you are a writer for a specific nation or a specific race, then fuck you” (qtd. in Habila, Introduction viii), Habila, in this statement, gestures toward the by-now familiar notion that African literary writing, through its circuits of production, circulation, and reception, has historically been overdetermined by its sociopolitical context, at the expense of aesthetic complexity. By making this claim, I am not, of course, suggesting that African literatures lack formal innovation or artistic merit; rather, my point here is that in its reception, as a body of writing within the global literary market, it has all-too-often been subsumed under what Henry Louis Gates, Jr., once termed the “anthropological fallacy” of black writing, that “curious valorization of [its] social and polemic functions” over its aesthetic content (5).

Indeed, the notion that African literary texts can provide transparent and unimpeded access to straightforward sociological data (indicated, for instance, by the fact that novels like Achebe’s Things Fall Apart were, until the 1980s, more likely to be found on social science, rather than arts and humanities, curricula) is one that has been critiqued widely elsewhere. Speaking about postcolonial literatures more broadly, Graham Huggan has written that market driven processes have resulted in a situation in which “access to these experiences [of the global South] is through the consumption of literary works by much-travelled writers who are perceived as having come from, or as having a connection to, ‘exotic’ places” (Huggan 19), a statement that captures the specifically epistemophillic impulse at the heart of the reception of African literatures in the global literary market. While it is certainly the case, following Brouillette, that there is a danger that “Huggan’s study is a version of what it analyzes, subscribing to a logic that separates the authentic from the inauthentic, the insider from the outsider” (19), it is nonetheless true that a certain pernicious form of literary tourism remains endemic with respect to African writing. In the African context, this tendency to reduce the text to the sociological is made particularly pernicious because of the corollary “image of Africa” that has plagued representations of the continent as “a foil to Europe, a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe’s own state of spiritual grace will be manifest” (Achebe, Hopes and Impediments 2–3). Taken together, these two phenomena—that of reading practices that position African literary texts predominantly as transparent, sociopolitical data, on the one hand, and that of the overdetermined a priori image of Africa in the global imaginary, on the other—have led to a contemporary situation where the very act of writing Africa comes prepackaged with a set of anxieties, presumptions, and predetermined imperatives that directly bear on issues of artistic autonomy and authorial agency (see for instance Forna; Okri).

In this context, Habila’s aspirational hope that writers of the new generation, contemporary writers, might stand the best chance of liberating themselves from the dense network of a priori assumptions, presumptions, and imperatives that have historically impinged on the artistic autonomy of the African writer (a label that is in itself problematic given the continent’s vast size and internal diversity) appears as a moment of resistance to the hegemonic circuits of power that mediate global literary production. At the same time, this form of resistance can itself only remain partial, situated, that is, in dialogue with—or in opposition to—the very movements it seeks...